Tuesday, March 24, 2009

I Tend To Call Them 'Comics' Because The Term 'Graphic Novel' Could Apply To American Psycho

There are many problems facing the US comic industry right now; sales of individual issues have generally dropped, there are now minimum orders which can be placed before the main distributor will carry an item, comic shops are closing down, and whilst the sales of collected volumes are up, it's hard to gather the individual issues into a bundle if the issues run, oh I dunno, three years late.

Anyway, one way that Marvel comics recently(ish) tried to attract new readers was by creating a new range of comics for new readers, which stripped away the decades of continuity attached to many well-known characters, and started from scratch. I think the idea was that these, unlike many comics, would be sold in places like Wal-Mart as well as specialist comic shops, but that plan didn't pan out, and the titles have kind of ended up being another, slightly alternate, mini-line from Marvel. A pretty good idea at heart, but the distribution of the issues seems to have dented the plan, and now they're winding the line up.

One of the final issues in this particular line of comics is shown above, and you'll notice that I've avoided naming either the comic line or any of the titles, because I want to ask non-comic readers this question: if you saw this comic on the shelf, what would you say its name was ?

(If you said Ultimatum, it's a good guess, but not quite; the correct answer is …this.)

I think it was Stan Lee (co-creator of Spider-Man, the Hulk, and many other characters) who once suggested that every issue of a comic is someone's first issue, and in terms of accessibility that's something worth bearing in mind; is it so hard to make sure this approach extends to the front bleeding cover?

2 comments:

Angela said...

LOL, I hadn't noticed that before! I am a comic book reader, and love the X-Men, hence I guessed which one this was. But you're right, it does look like Ultimatum. Wasn't very wise having that written in big at the top of the page, and Ultimate X-Men written smaller underneath it, and why have Cyclops optic blasts going right over the title? They could have had it going behind the title, and having it exploding in a bright red outline as it hits the back of the title, and actually highlight the title.

I think that would have worked much better!

John Soanes said...

Couldn't agree more - I think that the cover joins up with Ultimate Fantastic Four 60 (as per here), but it's pretty badly designed as it stands!
J